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In reply to Bernard Keane and Glenn Dyer, Crikey, 16 March 2026

Bernard Keane and Glenn Dyer write with typical forensic precision about the catastrophic destruction which Donald Trump is pretending to be in charge of as his government trashes the global picnic, the Strait of Hormuz, American credibility, and the rules-based order, a bad, parody of Orwellian double-speak at the best of times. Is he but the puppet of MBS and Netanyahu, a pair of homicidal maniacs?

Keane and Dyer’s analysis is sound. But there is, perhaps, a touch of accidental humanity and generosity buried in the framing, a structural alibi, that lets the principal architect of this unholy catastrophe off rather lightly.

True, Trump was “led” into this by accused felon (breach of trust, fraud and bribery) Bibi Netanyahu. As Epstein may have led him astray all those years ago aboard the Lolita Express all the way to Little St James, a Caribbean Hotel California. At Club Jeff you can check out any time you like but you can never leave. And, yes, it’s true that Mohammed bin Salman, the bone-sawyer of Riyadh, was mad keen to talk President Bone Spurs into destroying Iran. Like father like son. MBS, a man whose regard for human life makes Pete Hegseth look like a pool guard, has been whispering in Trump’s pink, porcine bullet-proof ear since before the first term. Bravo to the organ grinders. We can’t imagine how hard it’s been. We grant you your due. Trump Whisperers rule.

But the monkey chose to dance.

The “Trump was manipulated” narrative, however seductive, tends to dissolve individual agency into geopolitical determinism, and Trump has spent almost eighty years insisting he is the smartest, hottest kid in any room he enters. He should be held to that.

Trump launched Operation Epic Fury. He signed off on it. He let himself be swayed by Netanyahu, not only an accused felon but a man currently avoiding a war crimes tribunal with the diligence others reserve for evading their taxes. Bibi got through to Donald by dwelling on the huge target Trump has painted on his back. Call it the whack job channel. And it would be a walkover.

Bombing Iran into the Stone Age would be all done in dusted in a weekend. And welcomed by a grateful world. The deal was sweetened, no doubt, by MBS, who has his own reasons for wanting Iranian power obliterated. Saudi oil revenues stand to benefit rather nicely from a prolonged regional conflagration, even as his tankers share the Strait of Hormuz.

Many a catastrophe has good bones. The flotsam now clogging the Strait of Hormuz, the global oil market, and the burnt-out bases on which the US once pegged its credibility did not happen over night. It took years of patient construction, cultivation and guile. It required enablers; courtiers, a slick of oleaginous toadies. That’s before you get to the endless, trans-national transactionalism.

Cue a choir of true believers amidst a mob of magic-carpet-baggers, grifters and chancers who supplied the scaffolding and pipe-dreaming upon which a vain, chaotic, and catastrophically incurious man could climb so high; a height from which he has now blown himself up and taken much of the neighbourhood with him. And it began with a wall. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.

Trump’s Comeuppance is a story about a man constitutionally incapable of learning from failure, which is itself a story about America. Keane notes, correctly, that Trump is making the Iraq debacle look “astute, well-planned and legally sound.”

He is. But Dubya at least had the institutional backing of a functioning NSC, Colin Powell’s residual credibility, and a Congress that rolled over with bipartisan enthusiasm. Trump walked into this one carrying Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary, an ex-Gitmo guard whose main qualification for the role is his willingness to appear on Fox News in a manner that Trump finds agreeable.

That Trump could get to blow up the world without serious consequence (yet) or paying for any of his previous catastrophes is the deeper American story. An indulgent if erratic father handed him money and insulation. Roy Cohn, the original architect of the never-apologise, always-attack, make-the-truth-a-matter-of-stamina school of American public life, handed him a philosophy. A legal and financial system that consistently found ways to let him fail upward handed him survival. And a Republican Party that had been systematically hollowing out its own intellectual and ethical core for forty years handed him the presidency. Twice.

This is what US exceptionalism looks like without the mythology: not a shining city on a hill, but a system so thoroughly captured by money, spectacle, and the cult of the deal that it can produce a commander-in-chief who mistakes bluster for strategy, flattery for intelligence, and a Netanyahu phone call for geopolitical wisdom. And that’s before we get to what Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs calls the normalisation of violence and mass-murder in America’s public discourse.

The hubris here is not merely Trumpian. It is systemic; the belief that American military, economic power and CIA chicanery are so overwhelming that no adventure can truly go wrong, that the world will eventually fall into line, that China will cooperate when called upon and allies will follow when commanded. Trump simply stripped away the clothes and left the assumption standing there, blinking in the harsh light of a hundred-dollar barrel of oil. (Now $150 in Asian markets.)

It is worth naming one or two of the supporting cast. Not in the spirit of retrospective punishment, we are too far gone for that but because they will, when the history is written, attempt to slip away unnoticed, and they deserve not to. And for the light they provide on our veneration of the dark arts of naked pragmatism; doing whatever it takes. Transactionalism. We can start at home, a subsidiary of Woodside Petroleum. Wesfarmers, PwC, and ASX.

Take a bow, Joe “Hello World” Hockey, our man in Washington through Trump’s first term. Hockey was by most accounts a more capable diplomat than his earlier career as a cigar-puffing, budget-slashing Treasurer might have predicted. He read the Trump field early, went against his own government’s instincts to contact the campaign, got Greg Norman to supply the mobile number, and generally demonstrated more operational nous than Canberra deserved from its Washington posting. Credit where it is due.

And yet. There is in Hockey’s account of those years, in his memoir, in his public commentary, in the warmth of his retrospective regard for the man he managed, a studious refusal to name the thing plainly. He soft-pedalled both impeachments, hinted at voter fraud in 2020, and came to the strange conclusion that of all the countries doing business with Donald Trump, Australia did best.

That this was achieved largely by the diplomatic equivalent of not making sudden movements around an unpredictable large animal is left, perhaps wisely, unstated.

Hockey standing bare-headed in the Washington chill of January 2017, in the light rain that fell throughout the first inauguration, is a serviceable image for the posture of Australia’s conservative political class toward Trump generally: turning up, head uncovered, in the hope that something useful might be extracted from proximity to the man, and telling themselves afterwards that it was all in the national interest.

Craven enabler and accomplice-patsy all fit well, too.

But Hockey is a mere warm-up act. The principal performance in Australian Trumpism, the role that will require the most sustained critical attention when the reckoning arrives, belongs to our own epic-narcissist; the-man-who-would-be-an-entire-cabinet and yet an incredible Bunnings catalogue, Dad our own tea-table ukulele maestro, Scott Morrison.

Morrison did not merely admire Trump from a distance. He recognised him. Two men shaped by an absolute conviction of their own righteousness, armoured against contradiction by a theology; in Morrison’s case, literal, that interprets setbacks as spiritual tests and success as divine endorsement.

Two men who had constructed public personas of prodigious artifice: the marketing man from Cronulla doing the daggy-dad routine, the Manhattan developer doing the working-class hero, each performance calibrated to constituencies they quietly held in varying degrees of contempt. Two men for whom the politics of division, sovereign borders here, the Wall there, asylum seekers on Nauru and Tamil families on Christmas Island as the Pacific analogue of the caravan at the Rio Grande, was not an unfortunate necessity but a first instinct. You could see the same burning cross of certainty in both of them: in Morrison’s Pentecostal congregation with its eagles and prophecies, in Trump’s rallies with their own revivalist heat and their own chosen enemies.

When Morrison won in 2019, Trump respected him for it. He loves winners, we are told, and Morrison’s miracle election, achieved largely because the Australian electorate preferred not to think too hard, qualified him for the inner circle. The state dinner followed. The Oval Office warmth. When Trump was later out of office and the legal machinery of New York was grinding toward him, Morrison flew across to express solidarity, to note approvingly that the former president retained his true appreciation of the alliance, and to share warm words about the pile-on Trump was enduring.

The behaviour of a man who, having watched Operation Sovereign Borders become the template for cruelty dressed as policy, had no difficulty whatsoever recognising a kindred administrative spirit.

What Morrison saw in Trump, and Trump in Morrison, was the same immense and self-sufficient amour propre, the armour-plated self-regard that can accommodate God, an eagle, a Sharks jersey, a Hawaiian holiday during a national catastrophe, and the Robodebt scheme, without registering a moment of genuine moral disturbance. Both men were immune to the kind of internal conflict that the examined life produces. Both had found, in their respective political traditions, permission structures that elevated this immunity to a virtue. Morrison called it faith. Trump called it strength. History is likely to call it something else entirely.

The Liberals’ broader genuflection toward Trumpism was not confined to Morrison. There was a period, not long ago, when the smart set in Australian conservative circles was urgently debating how the Liberal Party could become “more transactional”, the preferred euphemism for importing the Trumpian method without having to acknowledge its ethics or its consequences. More deal-making. Less idealism. Border politics as a permanent campaign tool rather than an occasional emergency. The question was never asked of these analysts: transactional toward what end, and at whose expense? Because the ends were visible enough in the American original, and the expenses were always borne by people who did not attend the relevant think-tank lunches.

As for Netanyahu: Bibi gets what Bibi always gets. The nuclear option remains on the table. The ICC prosecutors remain at a safe distance. The domestic legal jeopardy that drove him toward this war in the first place, the corruption charges, the coalition arithmetic, the brinkmanship that has become indistinguishable from personal survival, all of it continues to be managed by the simple expedient of keeping the war going. There is always another target. There is always another escalation rung. And as long as Washington follows Tel Aviv’s lead, Bibi never has to face a courtroom. The organ grinders are doing fine.

Now the bill has arrived. Not for them, of course, it never is. The bill arrives at the door of the Strait of Hormuz, in the fuel price at the bowser in Ararat and Albury and Bankstown, in the interest rate decision the RBA must now make with one eye on an oil shock it did not cause and cannot control, in the cargo ships sitting idle outside a waterway that the world’s most powerful military cannot guarantee safe passage through.

And now Trump begs China to save him from his own misjudgment. China, which has spent two decades quietly building the leverage that America has spent two decades squandering. China, which watched the rare earths, the batteries, the renewables, the robotics, and the AI pipeline come online while Washington was busy with its reality television governance. China, which has absolutely no obligation to pull Trump out of a hole he dug, jumped into, and then expressed surprise about. It is, as Keane notes, a glimpse of a possible future where all traces of the unipolar moment have vanished; and not a future that any of the enablers, Australian or otherwise, paused to consider when they were busy stroking the ego that helped bring it about.

Nobody in this cast, not Netanyahu, not MBS, not the American hawks who convinced themselves the Iran adventure was really about containing China, not Hockey with his golf games and his mateship narrative, not Morrison with his burning certainties and his borrowed Trumpian political theology, not the Australian commentariat that urged the Liberal Party to be more transactional and meant it as a compliment, nobody is going to stand up now and acknowledge their share of the scaffolding.

That is what history is for. And history, unlike Pete Hegseth, is not taking reassurance from anyone.